


A Hazy Shade of Winter

by Firelightmystic



Series: Dresden Files AU [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, The Dresden Files - Jim Butcher
Genre: 10yearsofmcu, 2018 Stony MCU Bingo, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Dresden Files, Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, Good Intentions, Hell's Highway Improvement Plan Is Coming Along Nicely, Knight of the Cross Steve, Lies of Omission, M/M, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Steve Rogers Needs a Hug, Tony Stark Gives Him One, Winter Court Tony, challenge: mcu bingo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-28
Updated: 2018-05-28
Packaged: 2019-05-14 09:28:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,031
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14766965
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Firelightmystic/pseuds/Firelightmystic
Summary: They gave Captain America a shield so he could protect himself and others. Steve Rogers was given Esperacchius to champion Hope itself. When he wakes up from the disaster that was Project Insight, neither seems to have done him any good, and there's still Tony to contend with...





	A Hazy Shade of Winter

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Enki for the the beta help. As always, anything out of whack is courtesy of my own hardheadedness. Have some Dresden Files mashup. (I didn't intend a series, yet here we are...)
> 
> Fill for my "misunderstandings/miscommunication" square in Stony MCU Bingo.

* * *

“On your left.”

Waking up to Sam’s Wilson’s mockery was honestly unfair, but Steve supposed he should be grateful he was waking up at all. He’d passed out mid-fall into the Potomac, and he’d thought that was it. A long drop into darkness, then nothingness, and then he could enjoy his surprise retirement. The serum saw him through a lot, but even he hadn’t been certain it could handle that drop, not on top of the rest of the day’s events. He did not expect the unusually comfortable bed in what he was beginning to realize was his room at the Tower, or the soulful music overriding the quiet steady beep of the pulse monitor attached to his index finger.

Steve gave Sam a once-over, pleased to note that though his new friend seemed tired (and weren’t they all?) he wasn’t blatantly injured. Looked pretty okay in fact. Steve let his gaze wander away from Sam back to the sleek iPhone, and the bright LED display that read ‘Marvin Gaye - Trouble Man’. 

Scratch one off the list, then. 

“You. _Idiot.”_

Steve froze, a chill of apprehension crawling up his spine. Actually, no, that was a _literal_ chill, born of the kind of cold that reminded him of the arctic water, icy and unforgiving. The kind of chill that crawled up walls and frosted windows and mirrors and turned a man’s breath to vapor. The kind of cold that followed scions of the Winter Court, when they deigned to remind the world just who and what they were dealing with.

Steve turned his head to the right, flinched at the foreboding visage of the one person he both dreaded and was overjoyed to see, and then quickly turned it back to face Sam, who rolled his eyes. 

“Man, I said ‘on your left’ for a reason, Cap. There’s nothing but hell waiting for you on the right. Good luck with that, I guess. I’ll be right back. Promised Natasha I’d give her a call.” Sam dropped what was probably meant to be a comforting pat on his hand as he stood up and nodded at the room’s other occupant before beating a hasty retreat. 

Steve very kindly did not point out that Sam was full of it and obviously merely dipping out on a potentially nasty confrontation. He didn’t even really blame him, to be fair. _He_ rather wanted to pull the exact same stunt himself. 

Steve briefly considered closing his eyes and feigning sleep, but he was a Knight of the Cross--the wielder of Esperacchius, the Sword of Hope, no less--slayer of vampires and all manner of ghouls and goblins, and he’d gone through a World War, fought a Nazi cult and their human abomination of a leader, and survived being frozen 70 years in the Arctic, only to wake up and immediately fend off an alien invasion. He could damn well face down his (exceedingly) angry lover. 

“Tony.” 

A shadow fell over him, and Steve drank in the sight of the fae prince. Out of favor Tony Stark might be, but he was still Winter Court, and royal, and he wore the stamp of it proudly. His goatee was perfectly trimmed, and his dark hair was artfully cut and spiked. Today he’d donned a different suit of armor, and it was just as impressive and foreboding as the Iron Man armor itself. The bespoke suit he wore was worn with devastating effect, pearl white over a navy blue dress shirt with a muted silver tie tucked neatly into the accompanying vest, with tasteful diamond and sapphire cufflinks and a large diamond tie pin. Every line of the suit was flawless, flattered him completely, with nary a wrinkle or stain in sight despite Tony having no doubt slouched and paced and fretted for…for...

“How long was I out?” Steve began to shift around and work his way into an upright position, but was shoved back down quickly enough. Tony, Steve remembered, was stronger than most people gave him credit for. That slender frame was all muscle, and no minor amount of preternatural might behind it all as well. Tony couldn’t quite manhandle him around normally, but in this weakened state, the advantage was his. 

“Long enough that I was able to fly here from Manhattan, fish your shield and Esperacchius out of the fucking _Potomac,_ and then haul your sorry ass to the hospital to make sure you didn’t _die.”_

Tony’s fury was a cold one, each word clipped and clear and ripping into him like razor blades. Most people thought Tony’s temper ran hot, but that was a carefully constructed mask Steve had learned, part and parcel of the Tony Stark package he’d been shoveling down the world’s throat for years. Furthermore, Tony had the armor, and when explosions or repulsor blasts followed your bouts of anger, people assumed a hot temper. 

Steve could have told them otherwise. 

Cold could kill, and it burned the same as any fire, by the end.

Steve exhaled slowly, “I couldn’t bring you into this, Tony. You were at risk too, one of the Insight targets, and…”

“And what? You didn’t trust me?” Tony’s cheek twitched with the force of his not-quite repressed ire. “You share my bed and are a fixture in my life, but you couldn’t even be bothered to pick up a damn phone and call me? It was my own fucking tech, Steve! Did you think I wouldn’t be of any help?!”

Tony threw his hands up in disgust, and turned away to gaze out the window at the Manhattan skyline. Steve said nothing, not really having any ready justifications. He was of a mind to just let Tony have a moment to chew through his feelings. Tony was a mess of emotions, but he liked to deal with them on his own terms instead of leaving himself raw and exposed to the world. 

Steve had wandered into the minefield of Tony’s emotion processing to know to pick and choose his battles. He let Tony take the time he needed to regain his equilibrium, and rubbed the soft satin sheet pooled around him between his fingertips, wondering how everything in his life could have gone completely bottoms up for the second time now. He’d finally gotten his feet back under him, had started to adjust, and now this. 

At this rate, he’d be lucky if he came out with anything intact. 

Tony finally heaved out a gusty sigh and glanced back at Steve from over his shoulder.

“You didn’t call me, Steve. That’s so fucked up, you know? _I_ wasn't good enough, but the random guy you found on the Washington Mall? He’s okay? The _Black Widow_ was okay?” Tony ran a hand through his hair, then turned back around to face the window. 

“I didn't know about Hydra, Steve. I got into the systems at SHIELD, yes, but I didn't go deep enough. I never got the chance to. I know we sometimes operate in radically different spheres, but something like that? I would have blown it wide open. I would have told you, if I’d even _suspected._ ” Tony’s voice was deathly quiet, bitter. Tony, Steve abruptly realized, wasn’t angry. Well, no, he was. But there was more to it than that. Tony was...Jesus. Tony was _hurt._ Guilty, like he thought Steve blamed him. 

Steve’s jaw dropped slightly as Tony spoke, and he boggled at what he was hearing. Did Tony actually _think_ that he was holding him responsible for this mess?

“I should have known.”

Christ, Tony _did_ blame himself for not noticing sooner, and Steve was positive that he was thinking he had been cut out as some sort of punishment. Tony had taken the exclusion as an implicit lack of trust, and thought he deserved it. 

Steve had to marvel yet again at the depths of Tony’s insecurity. 

“Tony, _no_. It wasn’t that at all, I swear. I was trying to protect you.” 

“ _I’m_ not the one who needed protection! That homicidal psychopath with a hate on for you? He shot you up and threw you off the helicarrier! What were you thinking?” 

A deep lance of pain and horror shot through his intestines, souring his stomach and bringing up bile and acid. Steve fought down the urge to be sick, and took a steadying breath. “I was thinking, Tony, that it was Orthiel.” His lips grew dry, suddenly, and he licked at them, looked up to Tony’s hard gaze and met it resolutely. 

“That man holds one of the blackened denari, one of Judas’ silver pieces now possessed by fallen angels. Orthiel’s coin.”

Tony shifted, blatantly unsympathetic, but still listening. Tony was categorically unable to ignore information freely offered (or stolen, or purchased, or traded), and he would often lecture anyone he thought needed the lesson that “all knowledge is worth having.” How he held himself back from looting SHIELD’s database back during the invasion was a miracle in and of itself.

Steve reached his left hand out to Tony, grasping at the air in hopes that he would take it. 

Tony shot him a look--much the same as the one he’d speared him with on the helicarrier back when they first crossed paths and he’d blatantly backtracked away from insulting Stark Tower--and Steve let it fall back to the bed. Not so easily forgiven, then. 

“Orthiel...Orthiel was one of the Host’s strongest warriors, Tony. When the Archangel Michael flung Lucifer into Hell, Orthiel was there, casting out many of the Fallen after him. He went to the Northern lands soon afterward, and then...he Fell himself.”

Tony was entirely unmoved and just an arched an eyebrow, wordlessly prompting him to continue. 

“He was...all Denarians are a menace. Their machinations are deep and subtle, convoluted enough to rival political masters or the Winter Queen, Mab, herself, but Orthiel didn’t seem to exhibit that same tendency. He had no use for grand schemes or even the political maneuvering amongst the Denarians themselves.”

Steve shrugged morosely. “Orthiel would just ensnare a host and batter them mentally until they succumbed and then he consumed them utterly, till it was just him in a human shell. And then he killed. He killed indiscriminately, but he didn’t torture or rape or steal. He appeared and people died, as if he was working his way through some sort of infernal hit list. It was bad enough on his own, but Hydra...Hydra found Orthiel’s coin, Tony. It was looted from the synagogue where it had been hidden, and Hydra gave it to the Winter Soldier.”

A flash of recognition in Tony’s eyes. Steve had never heard of the Winter Soldier, but Natasha had. He’d assumed almost immediately that it was some sadistic fae assassin loosed by Mab, but mortal politics and power-plays held little interest for her. He’d wondered if Tony had known about him. Apparently Tony knew _of_ the Winter Soldier, but what specifics that entailed…

_‘Did you know James Buchanan Barnes was the Winter Soldier? Did you know my closest friend had been twisted into that monster? Or was he just a minor annoyance on your radar? An irritant nobody?’_

Ridiculous. Tony was fiercely intelligent and deeply knowledgeable, but that only went so far. To assume Tony not only knew who the Winter Soldier _actually_ was, but that he also deliberately withheld that information from him? That spoke of a level of omniscience--and malice--that Steve just couldn’t believe Tony was capable of. 

“I...we- _I_ \--thought that it was Winter’s Knight at first, under a different name. Or mayhap a member of her Court.”

“You wouldn’t be the first,” Tony muttered sourly. “Mab would see him dead for that audacity alone. She has no great love for Hydra in the first place, and to claim Winter’s name and then wreck her plans? She’s set her Knight after the Winter Soldier before.”

Steve felt the color drain from his face. 

Bucky was a marked man. Winter’s Queen was not merciful, and Steve couldn’t envision a singularly worse person to incur a grudge from.

And Tony...For all he was Howard Stark’s son, he was also Mab’s, cunning and charismatic and ruthless. Not the heir nor the spare, but her child nevertheless, and he paid his debts. Tony had said as much before, hadn’t he? He’d defied Mab once, for his sake, and Steve knew that Tony would seize any opportunity to soothe her ire. Dumping the Winter Soldier at her feet might very well do the trick. 

And if he told Tony about what the Winter Soldier had done to his parents…Mab had been fond of both Howard and Maria, and for all the strain between them, Steve didn’t believe for one moment that Tony _hated_ them. Blood was thicker than whiskey, Tony had said once. He would have the Soldier’s head on a platter, if Mab herself didn’t beat him to it. 

“Tony, she can’t--Orthiel has taken the Winter Soldier for his host.”

“All the more reason to stop him. Aren’t you Knights the Denarians’ sworn enemy? Why did you hesitate, Steve?”

Steve shook his head solemnly. “Because the Knights of the Cross weren’t founded to destroy the Denarians, Tony. We exist to save them from the Fallen. We help them, however we can, get them to give up the blackened coin. The Fallen that inhabit the coins are the enemy, and their hosts just as much their victims as anyone else. The Winter Soldier is Orthiel’s victim.”

“I’m not particularly moved to pity for some jumped up Hydra assassin.” Tony murmured under his breath.

“There’s nothing but victims in this story, Tony. Orthiel has taken the Winter Soldier as host, and Hydra...took a good man, and twisted him against his will into the Soldier. The Winter Soldier has no free will, has just been brainwashed and turned into a pawn a...a _weapon._ ”

“Am I supposed to shed tears for the fist of Hydra?” Tony snapped. “Brainwashed or not, he’s killed people. He nearly killed you!”

There it was. The crux of the matter. Tony, already protective of what he considered “his own”, had only gotten worse since the Mandarin, and Steve knew he still had nightmares about Pepper. Tony had ensured she was fine by the end, but the damage was done. Tony had become nigh obsessive about ensuring the personal safety of his loved ones, and what Steve had gone through was like as not to send him right over the edge. Much more than his perceived guilt, it was the the fact that he had nearly lost Steve and hadn't been there to do anything about it that had him worked up. 

Steve had been hurt, could have been killed, and that was all Tony could see--a thousand what-ifs, and no consideration for what actually was. Steve was alive and mostly well--would be just fine once the serum did its trick-- but all Tony could see was the grim alternative. He was stuck on it.

Steve’s own ire rose. Tony had his point, but he was holding on to this slight like a dog with a meaty bone, and _not listening,_ and how was he supposed to make him understand? Bucky was _still in there,_ still _fighting_ the influence of both Orthiel and the Winter Soldier. Nothing that had happened to him had been his choice, and even as he slipped further and further away from himself he still fought. Steve had gotten through to him on the helicarrier--he’d been sure of it. He just need more time. If Bucky could get help, Steve was sure, if he could get to him, he would be able to buoy his friend, to get him to surrender the coin, and even pull back from the Winter Soldier entirely some day. He could get Bucky _back._ He owed him that much, at least. 

“It’s _Bucky._ ” Steve grit out, eyes stinging with angry tears. “I thought Bucky was dead, when he fell from the train, but he wasn’t. I...I didn’t even _look,_ Tony. I just...let him fall, and then abandoned him to the cold wilderness, and while I should have been looking, Hydra found him instead, and they tortured him, and they broke him, and they wiped away his memories and pressed a blackened denari into his hand and sent him forth to murder. Orthiel is the Winter Soldier, and the Winter Soldier is Bucky Barnes, and it’s _all my fault._ ”

The tears came then, burning hot and bitter, but a shadow enveloped him and his head was drawn into deceptively strong arms, a gentle refuge that smelled of cool water and and crisp leaves, and the bergamont in the tea Peggy so jealously hoarded. _Tony._

Steve let his head rest in Tony’s embrace, feeling the truth he needed to utter heavy on the tip of his tongue. He needed to tell Tony the rest. But it would be hard enough work getting past this day anyway. Steve swallowed thickly, guilt and shame leaden in his throat as he remained silent, taking this one moment of comfort he so desperately needed. 

He just needed to work through this hurdle with Tony, and then? Then, when they were good, when Tony was in a better state? He would tell him about the assassination Hydra had arranged. And, maybe, maybe he didn’t have to say anything at all. When he finished investigating and had tracked Bucky down, maybe he would’ve discovered that it hadn’t been the Soldier who’d done the deed, in the end. Hydra had plenty of agents, and Howard had always had his share of enemies, and maybe, maybe Zola had been lying. Trying to throw them off balance long enough to launch that missile. Or just toying with him because he could. 

It was a longshot, but the glimmer of hope remained within his mind, a frail desperate thing, really. How was he supposed to choose between Bucky and Tony? Steve closed his eyes, resting his head against Tony’s arc reactor. 

_Please,_ he prayed, _Please, God, don’t make me choose._


End file.
